Best birthday cake

Birthdays, as you get older, tend to mean less and less. With increasing age, the appetite for endless sweets and the marking of the cruel passage of time diminishes, and colourful clown-filled parties are replaced with more sedate celebrations.

But we do not care about that, for we, here at Word Of Mouth are only one year old, today, and birthdays are still the most exciting thing in the world. We were trying to think of something special to have to celebrate this fact, and it all kept coming back to one thing: cake. Bring on the cake. Birthdays aren't birthdays without birthday cake, are they? But what kind of cake makes the very best birthday?

Birthdays, like so many holidays, are an excuse for raucousness and overeating - when you're little this can take the form of many brightly coloured things: jelly, ice cream, as many sweets as you can fit in your mouth at once, and fizzy, fizzy drinks.

On his first birthday I watched my cousin have his first taste of something brightly coloured and fizzy. He opened his mouth to take a drink, and then stared in horror as the normal drinking vessel that had always been very sedate previously suddenly started doing weird things like making popping noises and causing weird sensations on the top of his mouth. Still, serves us right for giving him two berocca and some iron filings in a cup of acid. Children can be so cruel.

I'm kidding, of course, we didn't do that.

It was a cup of Lilt.

I know. Children. So cruel.

And as you get older, the party food gets boiled down from all those many bowls onto one enormous plate. To the cake.

If you work in an office, it's one of the weird rituals that seems different in every single one: In some the cake gets bought for you by your employer; in some everyone clubs up and secretly buys cake; in some the cake must be bought by the birthday-holder, and shared amongst their colleagues; in others cake is banned on pain of firing. Or at least 'tutting'. And then, occasionally, someone will go to the bother of actually baking a cake - and then the stakes are upped exponentially.

A good cake represents the very pinnacle of the day, richly flavoured and expertly put together, homebaked and self-decorated, the cake can make someone's day; candles are common, numbers acceptable up to a certain point, and in extravagant, themes; we made my swimming-mad sister a themed cake once. The blue icing with the little submerged lego figures went down a storm - although may have been, in retrospect, a health and safety nightmare - the food-colour laden blue-green sponge cake beneath it, however, was less popular.

But cake is a subjective thing. Where some people only might suggest a perfect cupcake with a single candle, others want a 14 storey gateau with ganache dripping off every edge. My personal idea of a perfect birthday cake, being a late spring kid, is some kind of tart baked cheesecake (like this, but adapted) but that's just me. Susan, Word of Mouth editor, says her favourite cake is, amazingly, also key lime pie - specifically, though, only this one. In a retro manner Jay Rayner favours a Black Forest gateau, Tim Hayward goes misty eyed at the memory of a steam train made of chocolate Swiss rolls running on angelica rails with liquorice allsorts buffers, Fraser Lewry goes crazy for a Black Pearl Layer Cake and Rick Peters, also of this blog parish, likes any sort of chocolate cake. Over to you.